Businesses in 14 countries are using Stripe to sell to customers all over the world. About 1 billion people hold one of the cards that Stripe supports today, but these card brands see little usage in China. Alipay, on the other hand, is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers. We’re building a universal platform for internet commerce; in order to enable China’s 1.3 billion people to buy from Stripe businesses, we decided to add support for Alipay.

You won’t need to change your integration: once you enable Alipay in your dashboard, Chinese customers will see it as a payment option in Checkout. (On a technical level, both credit cards and Alipay will give you a normal token for charging or for attaching to a customer.) Similarly, earnings from Alipay will be included in your existing daily deposit. Recurring payments will work normally too. We think that having a unified set of APIs is very important: dealing with a plethora of different payment methods would quickly become unmanageable.

We spent a lot of time designing the ideal purchasing experience. Traditionally, paying with Alipay meant being bounced to a different site. With Stripe, Alipay users will simply enter their email address and a six-digit SMS code in Checkout. It works great on desktop and mobile. (Here’s a preview of what it’ll look like.)

We’ll be rolling out support to everyone over the coming weeks. Feel free to sign up if you’d like to participate in the beta or to be notified once we launch. And if you have any questions, just drop us a line.